Fondant or confectioner's sugar is used to produce conventional pastry icings. The adding of additional ingredients such as other sugars, fats, sugar alcohols, thickeners, emulsifiers, dyes and flavors is possible.
Fondants are soft, pasty sugar compounds that are used themselves to produce various confections, as a filling, or as icing for foodstuffs and luxury foods. To produce a fondant, sucrose, glucose syrup, inverted sugar creams, and/or sugar alcohols, and water are used, for example. The compound is boiled and then processed into a soft paste via strong kneading and quick cool-down. Flavors or also foodstuff dyes can also be subsequently added. Fondant is usually produced by supersaturating a sugar solution, particularly a sucrose solution. Excess sucrose is dissolved in hot water, wherein the sugar remains dissolved once the solution cools down and thus forms a supersaturated solution. If seed crystals are added to a supersaturated solution, the dissolved sucrose precipitates out as crystals.
Before being used as icing on baked goods, for example, a fondant comprises a two-phase sugar system made up of a sugar-containing liquid—thus non-crystalline phase—and a phase containing crystalline sugar. In the prior art, the crystalline sugar in the fondant is created by precipitating out crystals from the liquid phase.
Fondant icing is often used to glaze baked goods or pastries, for example donuts. If a fondant based purely on sucrose is used, the storage stability or, respectively, the shelf life of the pastry is greatly limited since sucrose has a hygroscopic effect and the icing therefore becomes gooey during storage. In addition to fondants made of sucrose, fondants made of trehalose are also known in the prior art. Due to a high water content, however, trehalose as a solid tends to clump together and is therefore disadvantageous during processing.
DE 10 2010 055 577 A1 describes an isomaltulose-containing fondant having a non-crystalline phase made of glucose syrup. JP H8-89175 A describes various fondants based on isomaltulose or isomalt.
To summarize, conventional icings may become gooey because the moisture from the pastry migrates into the icing and/or the ambient humidity is absorbed into the packaging due to the hygroscopic property of the sucrose and other sugars (fructose, glucose). If the icing becomes gooey, it runs down the pastry and collects at the base of the packaging, which will reduce the microbiological stability. The pastry can also become dry due to this. In addition, conventional transparent icings may not remain transparent because the moisture from the icing migrates to a sweet pastry (for example a donut), such that the solubility of the sugar in the icing is reduced and may result in crystallization of the present sugar (blooming), and therefore to a clouding.